Newcastle University scientists have discovered a way of identifying the unique makeup of each individual sheet of paper — and this could make your passport a lot cheaper.

At the moment, one way of protecting against false documents is to embed electronic chips within them, as is currently done in UK e-passports.

But this is expensive: chips must be completely secure, and the top-quality systems needed to ensure this meant when the chips were added to passports in 2006, the cost of an adult passport rose from £42 to £72.

But this new method gives a cheap and easy way to authenticate any paper document, just by taking a picture of it on a standard camera.

A British passport (Image: PA)

Analysing the translucent patterns revealed when a light shines through paper, researchers identified a unique ‘texture’ fingerprint for every single sheet of paper. Instead of expensive chips, border officials could, in future, use this method, which is nearly impossible to cheat, to check your documents.

Publishing their findings in the academic journal ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, the Newcastle team – Ehsan Toreini, Dr Feng Hao and Dr Siamak Shahandashti - said the findings offered a new way to verify physical documents and reduce the risk of forgery.

Dr Feng Hao, co-author and Reader in Security Engineering at Newcastle University, said: “What we have shown is that every piece of paper contains unique intrinsic features just as every person has unique intrinsic biometric features.

“By using an ordinary light source and an off-the- shelf camera, it takes just 1.3 seconds and one snapshot to capture those features and produce a texture ‘fingerprint’ that is unique to that document.

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For instance, it could be used by potential employers to check whether a degree certificate was legitimate. Before the certificate is issued, the paper texture is extracted from the certificate, digitally signed by the institution and printed on the certificate as a barcode.

Anyone wanting to verify the authenticity of the certificate would simple take a picture of a specified area of the document, and the system would compare the new image with the digitally signed copy stored in the barcode — immediately confirming whether or not it was real.